Last Night
Canada/France 1998
Reviewed by Richard Kelly
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
A Canadian city, 6 pm. The world is due to end at midnight. Patrick Wheeler attends a last 'Christmas' dinner with his family. His sister Jennifer and her boyfriend Alex are going to a party. Patrick's parents try in vain to dissuade Patrick from leaving to spend the final hours alone. Gas-company executive Duncan and his colleague Donna attempt to keep services running until the end. Sandra is trying to join her husband at home, but her car is wrecked by revellers, civil order having collapsed. Craig makes love to a succession of women, including his high-school French teacher Mrs Carlton.
Patrick meets Sandra on his doorstep, and takes her to Craig's where she borrows a car. Craig tells Patrick he is attempting to fit in every conceivable sexual activity, but Patrick declines Craig's proposition to have sex with him. Sandra is unable to drive through the throng of revellers in the city. Duncan is killed in his home by a stranger. As midnight approaches, Craig relieves Donna of her virginity. Sandra (Duncan's wife) returns and asks Patrick to replace Duncan in a suicide pact the couple had planned. They hold guns to each other's heads, but at the last moment, they kiss.
Review
"Millenniums," disgraced MP Peter Mandelson once wrote with customary acuity, "only come once in a thousand years." Good job too, since they are widely supposed to provoke all manner of feverish atavism in the populace. But as we now face down the year 2000, our fevers seem to find expression only in senseless pop songs and disaster movies about meteors. Fair play then to actor-director Don McKellar: few millennarian dramas have been so muted and mild-mannered as his directorial debut.
One would like to forswear cultural stereotypes, but as a vision of terminal chaos and decadence, Last Night is deeply bourgeois-Canadian. There's a lot of finicky emoting, not much in the way of liberating gut-laughter, and it all seems to unfold in a series of tasteful Toronto apartments. David Cronenberg once described the experience of making his film Shivers (1974) in a Montreal apartment block: "We all wanted to rip that place apart and run naked, screaming, through the halls." Here, however, the cultivated sterility of early Atom Egoyan pervades the proceedings. One's heart sinks with the appearance of Egoyan regular Arsinée Khanjian in a typically haunted, waxen cameo.
McKellar's cleverest visual trick is that the entire drama is played out in broad daylight: darkness never falls, even at the bitter end. But his refusal to explain exactly why the end is nigh is a very contemporary cop-out. The dialogue has much sport at the expense of mobile phones, mainframes and internet pick-ups, so there's a nagging sense throughout that humankind has meekly consented to its own destruction, in a devil's pact with impersonal technologies. But some vague nostalgia for human spirit and solidarity can be discerned, for example when Patrick lectures Sandra on the socialist significance of Pete Seeger's version of José Marti's 'Guantanamera'.
To his great credit, McKellar has picked some fine performers, and engineered a good number of grace notes. As the keen libertine Craig, Callum Keith Rennie has a wiry, raffish sexual presence, his bedroom chores accompanied always by Parliament's 'I've Been Watching You'. As one of Craig's last partners, the wonderful Geneviève Bujold brings a draft of wanton elegance to the affair. Tracy Wright does an endearing turn as virginal office stalwart Donna, hoping finally to escape her fruitless workplace. And David Cronenberg himself is well cast as the aspirant suicide Duncan, forced to confront the reaper before his self-appointed hour. The reasoning purr of Cronenberg's voice, and his blankly sinister face (into which all available shadows seem to fly) are ideal for the task.
McKellar's only mistake was to craft the niggling central role of Patrick, and then play it himself. His prickly, nebbish persona can't give the movie a spine. When Patrick and Craig are alone and Craig makes a modest proposal that they get horizontal, the audience anticipates Patrick's wary flinch well before it comes. If he had stuck his tongue down his fellow actor's throat, he'd have sent us careering off into a much livelier movie.
Instead, the final, calculated exchange of fates is a bit of a let-down. Duncan dies alone, and we're denied what would have been an intriguing last intimacy between him and Sandra. Patrick steps in to deputise, and at last we learn the excuse for his quavering reticence throughout the film: his saintly girlfriend Karen - a kindergarten teacher, of course - was lately and cruelly snatched from him by death. Thus as all humanity faces extinction, Patrick wants to be loved for his very own personal tragedy. The sentiment feels strangely late-twentieth century in its towering conceit, but it's at least as old as 'September 1, 1939'. "Not universal love/But to be loved alone": this craving Auden ruefully skewered as the commonest of human failings, before proposing that "we must love one another or die."
Credits
- Producers
- Niv Fichman
- Daniel Iron
- Screenplay
- Don McKellar
- Director of Photography
- Douglas Koch
- Editor
- Reginald Harkema
- Production Designer
- John Dondertman
- Music
- Alexina Louie
- Alex Pauk
- ©Rhombus Media Inc
- Production Companies
- Rhombus Media presents a Rhombus Media production
- Produced with the participation of Telefilm Canada in association with La Sept ARTE and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
- Produced in association with Haut et Court
- With the participation of Canada Television and Cable Production Fund/Telefilm Canada - Equity Investment Program and The Canadian Film or Video
- Production Tax Credit Program
- Executive Producers
- Caroline Benjo
- Carole Scotta
- Co-producer
- Joseph Boccia
- Associate Producers
- Rhombus Media:
- Sheena MacDonald
- Larry Weinstein
- Barbara Willis Sweete
- Jennifer Jonas
- For Haut et Court
- Simon Arnal-Szlovak
- Rémi Burah
- Caroline Ghienne
- Barbara Letellier
- Paul Onteniente
- Laurence Petit
- Olivier Pasquier
- For Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
- George Anthony
- For La Sept ARTE
- Pierre Chevalier
- François Sauvagnargues
- Nicolas Saada
- Odile Carrière
- Production Co-ordinator
- Robin M. Reelis
- Unit Production Manager
- Joseph Boccia
- Location Manager
- Lilit 'Hank' Malins
- Post-production Supervisor
- Jody Shapiro
- Assistant Directors
- Jennifer Jonas
- Trent Hurry
- Maria Popoff
- Annie Bradley
- Script Supervisor
- Oliver Olsen
- Casting Director
- Diane Kerbel
- Digital Video Effects Created by
- Buzz Image Group
- Executive Producer:
- Jean Raymond Bourque
- Producer:
- Yves Laniel
- Director:
- Stéphane Landry
- CGI Animators:
- Dominic Daigle
- François Lord
- Compositing Artists:
- Frank D'Iorio
- Mathieu Dupuis
- Digital Film Scanning/Printing:
- Serge Langlois
- System Manager:
- Davis Goodman
- Production Co-ordinator:
- Mylène Guérin
- Special Effects
- Supervisor:
- John LaForet
- Art Director
- Kei Ng
- Set Decorator
- Patricia Cuccia
- Costume Designer
- Lea Carlson
- Key Wardrobe
- Starr Jacobs
- Gillian Steinhardt
- Make-up Artist
- Sarah Fairbairn
- Hair Stylist
- Clara Dinunzio
- Title Design
- William Cameron
- Topix
- Mad Dog
- Opticals
- Film Effects Inc
- Music Performed by
- Esprit Orchestra
- Conductor
- Alex Pauk
- Music Supervisors
- Janet York
- Michael Perlmutter
- S.L. Feldman & Associates
- Music Editors
- Colin Baxter
- Hans Lucas
- Christopher Donaldson
- Soundtrack
- "(Last Night) I Didn't Get to Sleep at All" by Tony Macaulay, performed by The 5th Dimension; "Silent Night" (trad), performed by Rita MacNeil; "Deck the Halls", "First Noel" (trad), arranged by Keith Papworth; "We Wish You a Happy Christmas" (trad), arranged by P. Lewis; "Jimmy Loves Mary Ann" by Elliot Lurie, performed by Looking Glass; "I've Been Watching You (Move Your Sexy Body)" by Garry M. Shider, Glenn Goins, George Clinton Jr, performed by Parliament; "Heartbeat, It's a Love Beat" by Michael T. Kennedy, William G. Hudspeth, performed by The DeFranco Family; "Glamour Boy" by Burton Cummings, performed by The Guess Who; "Piano Four" by Howard Shore, performed by Yuval Fichman; "Last Song" by Larry Evoy, performed by Edward Bear; "Takin' Care of Business" by Randy Bachman; "Guantanamera" by José Fernandez Diaz, Julian Orbon, Pete Seeger, José Marti, performed by Pete Seeger
- Sound Design
- Steve Munro
- Production Sound Mixer
- John J. Thomson
- Re-recording Mixers
- Paul Sharpe
- Dean Giammarco
- Miguel Nunes
- Dialogue Editor
- David Drainie Taylor
- ADR
- Recordists:
- Ray Campbell
- Trackworks Inc
- Dave Rose
- Casablanca Sound and Picture Services
- Tom O'Connell
- Rick Canelli
- Warner Hollywood Studios
- Editor:
- Tim Roberts
- Foley
- Artists:
- Andy Malcolm
- Goro Koyama
- Mixer:
- Tony Van Den Akker
- Stunt Co-ordinator
- Peter Szkoda
- Cast
- Don McKellar
- Patrick Wheeler
- Sandra Oh
- Sandra
- Callum Keith Rennie
- Craig Zwiller
- Sarah Polley
- Jennifer Wheeler
- David Cronenberg
- Duncan
- Robin Gammell
- Mr Wheeler
- Roberta Maxwell
- Mrs Wheeler
- Tracy Wright
- Donna
- Michael McMurtry
- Menzies
- Charmion King
- grandmother
- Trent Mcmullen
- Alex
- Arsinée Khanjian
- streetcar mother
- Geneviève Bujold
- Mrs Carlton
- Jessica Booker
- Rose
- Karen Glave
- Lily
- Chandra Muszka
- streetcar daughter
- Brian Renfro
- angry driver
- François Girard
- Daniel Iron
- Bruce McDonald
- wild guys
- Pierre Elrick
- Cousin Ernie
- Kirsten Johnson
- Regan Moore
- Darren O'Donnell
- revellers
- Bob Martin
- TV newscaster
- Michael Barry
- Marty
- Nathalie Shats
- Marty's girlfriend
- Tom McCamus
- radio DJ
- Jackie Burroughs
- the runner
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- Film Four Distributors
- 8,506 feet
- 94 minutes 31 seconds
- Dolby
- In Colour